Abstract : The French and the Americans are often presented as having radically different relations to popular and high culture. Yet no analysis has systematically compared the evolutions of cultural participation in the two countries over time. In this paper, we propose a statistical exploration of two nationally representative cross-sectional data sets: the four waves of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts in the United States (1982-2008) and the Enquêtes sur les Pratiques Culturelles des Français (1981-2008). We argue that in both countries the relationship between cultural practices and social stratification has changed over time and across generations. In the United States and in France, highbrow cultural activities and reading practices have declined over time, whereas television viewing has increased. We then focus on the impact of period change and cohort renewal on these evolutions. We show a fairly close proximity of the two countries as to the impact of the social factors of cultural participation but a greater prevalence of cohort effects in France and of period effects in the US. France also differs from the US by the mitigated effect of education on cultural practices observed in the more recent cohorts.
These cohorts experienced a massive school expansion, which occurred in France much later than in the US. Finally, there is no indication of a weaker stratifying power of culture in the US than in France. The two countries differ by the extent of generational changes observed in French cultural habits since the early 80s, which contrasts with the relative stability of the American ones during the same period.